Switch to Shut Off America
Like the partial rainbows we forget to look at
I am not the storm clouds gathering on the horizon.
Pics or it didn’t happen, the pathetic acoustic
guitar mine smashed in the credit card commercial.
What songs are these we sing in the slaughter house?
What songs take bodies and make money of them?
I thumbing my privilege steeped in yelling screens
and wondering, will the weekend warriors really rally this time?
When I accidentally walked in on you in the bathroom
it was unfortunate that we locked eyes in the mirror.
I promise I saw nothing, it all scans the same
is one way to read it, the perspectives buzzing
Hornet’s nest in the chimney, plastic bags
in bloom and collecting rain along the coast.
There’s a hunger that only wolves have
and there are so many wolves.
Paradise Redux
after Pop. 1280
nostalgia is a form of self-healing
the post noted I didn’t read the article
but it occurred to me what occupies
my 90s college radio playlist what I remember about
the yellow & orange tile the kitchen 1986-91
is a small part of what brought us here
are we not running into death on the dance floor
as a country somehow wearing out the buttons
gnashing them teeth at each other
when the deportations begin a cracked whip
between clients will signal the need
for detention facilities the slipped stitch
in an arm band will break up families
police will shoot to kill
& that one to wrap the bodies
in their own charcoal to wear gunmetal pin stripes
while signaling the order
what I’m saying is it will take more than
our favorite sweaters to stop the slide
backwards the assaults the camps
Parallel Parking the Moon
It gets difficult here,
I’d like to text the moon
while reversing,
lying through my teeth
through the stale stomachache
of the surface content.
In North Korea, US American youth
are characterized as living
in their parents’ basements
joylessly masturbating
to the internet,
growing fat.
The body tells a story
I read elsewhere in orbit,
and not having walked
an appreciable distance
in quite some time,
not having run enough
fingers in the dust,
I could only chart
the movements,
both hapless pedestrian
in the thick of it,
and poor driver.
To move the moon aside
is to fall into a gerund trap,
you might say, or to chew
on the same pencil
in second grade, taste eraser,
that shiny aluminum circle
that holds it
bent out of shape forever
as all things are
in the mouth.
Mark Gurarie currently splits time between Brooklyn, NY and Northampton, MA. He is the author of one full-length poetry collection, Everybody's Automat (The Operating System, 2016), and his poems and prose have appeared in Pelt, Paper Darts, Sink Review, Everyday Genius, The Rumpus, The Literary Review, Coldfront, Publishers Weekly, Lyre Lyre and elsewhere. In 2012, the New School published Pop :: Song, the 2011 winner of its Poetry Chapbook Competition. Alongside Alex Crowley, he founded and is curator-at- large of the Mental Marginalia Reading Series in New York and helps edit poetry and reviews for Boog City. Gurarie lends bass guitar and occasional vocals to psych-punk band, Galapagos Now! and works as an adjunct instructor, book reviewer and free-lance writer.